“He did. He has a high opinion of himself, if you can imagine that.” Casmir smirked.
Kim couldn’t tell if it was because Casmir also had a high opinion of himself, and was admitting to some hypocrisy, or if it was something else. Probably something else. If anything, Casmir was too self-critical and underplayed his abilities.
“I thought if we—or you—could get him to somehow give his word that he wouldn’t attack the Fleet and try to get the gate, we could avoid all manner of potential ugliness.”
“And how am I supposed to do that?”
“You could ask him to knock it off and go away.”
“Would that work on you if there was something you wanted? I seem to remember telling you to stop obsessing about that signed Remstar Robot first-run model that you were trying to convince other people not to bid on at the fundraiser auction so that you could get it. And now it’s on top of your dresser.”
“That’s because you’re my roommate and my friend, but not—” Casmir wiped his fingers, as if to remove something distasteful, “—whatever Rache would like you to be for him.”
“I’m not sure he wants me to be anything, but I’m not using that against him, regardless.”
“It wouldn’t be manipulative. I mean, it would be, but it would be to save lives. His… mine…” Casmir splayed a hand over his chest.
“Why would your life specifically be in danger?”
The lives of everyone on the ship would be in danger if they flew into battle, but Casmir seemed to be alluding to something different.
“I jokingly said that Ishii wouldn’t send me into battle against Rache and his mercenaries, and Lieutenant Meister less jokingly said that Ishii would do whatever it takes to complete his mission. He looked very significantly at Zee.”
“Wouldn’t that imply Zee’s life would be in danger?”
“I’m just worried about all of our lives if we go up against him. And if Ishii orders me to send Zee after Rache. I’d hate to be responsible for his death. Why do we all have to fight each other, anyway? It seems like we should be able to get Rache and Ishii to work together, at least for this. They both want the gate. Someone else has the gate. Why shouldn’t they jointly try to stomp the astroshamans instead of starting what already sounds like it’s going to be a wire tangle from hell?”
“Because only one side can get the gate in the end.”
“That’s not really true. It’s in five hundred pieces in the hold of that cargo ship. Rache could have a piece, Jager could have a piece, your mom could have a piece, and every government in the Twelve Systems with research teams could have a piece.” Casmir had been pacing and flailing his arms about, but he stopped abruptly. “Kim, am I mashugana, or could that actually work?”
“If that word means crazy, then yes.”
“No, I’m serious.” He spun to face her. “I know what everybody wants—exclusive access to that gate to study, replicate, and use for their own gain—but I’ve thought from the beginning that no one person or government or organization should have that much power. This has the potential to end humanity’s isolation in these Twelve Systems, to let us go to the rest of the stars, maybe even beyond our galaxy. It could also give us an opportunity to visit Earth again and find out what happened to our ancestors. But if everybody got a piece and a chance to study it, wouldn’t that be a lot better? More fair? And, oh!” His eyes widened, and he grinned. “Maybe it would even mean that in order to get that gate working and use it, all of the systems would have to come together in a truce or even an alliance to plug the pieces together. We’d have to all work together.”
“Do you know how Machiavellian you look right now?”
“Maybe that last part wouldn’t happen, not if each piece had the basic building blocks of the entire gate within it and could be reverse-engineered to build a new gate, but isn’t it a lovely thought? People coming together for scientific discovery?”
“More likely, some self-appointed warlord would go around the systems, conquering everyone and stealing their gate pieces.”
“You’re so pessimistic.”
“You’re so naive.”
“I guess it’s a good thing we balance each other out. Let’s figure out what we can about Rache, just in case an opportunity to stop a war before it starts comes up.” Casmir shrugged and clasped his hands behind his back, as if he’d given up on his crazy idea, but Kim knew him better than that. His eyes were practically gleaming as he calculated permutations in his mind.
Casmir sat on the deck, his back to the wall. “Let me tell you what I know, and you can tell me what you know and are willing to share. I’m going to run some searches based on my face too. Better get that done before we leave the system, as what we want would be on the Kingdom network if it’s there. And it must be. There’s a reason he doesn’t show his face to people, presumably because it could be used to identify him and tie him back to the king and queen.”
Yes, Kim remembered that Jager and Iku had been listed at the Zamek Royal Seed Bank on the day that Admiral Mikita’s genetic material had been checked out. “You can sit in the chair. I left it for you.”
“Thank you, but I thought you might want it. My back always starts to hurt if I sit like that for too long.” He waved to her cross-legged-on-the-bed position.
“Perhaps you should do some exercises to strengthen it.”
He stuck his tongue out at her. From Machiavellian to toddler-esque in twenty seconds.
“He signed one of his messages to me as David,” Kim said. “Did he ever give you his name?”
“No, he’s given me nothing. What little I know I got from listening to our nemesis at the base rant at him while his underlings were trying to strip him of his armor. Bernard seemed delighted to have some proof that he was who he’d long thought he was. Rache’s hood was off then, you see. Bernard mentioned Rache used to get a hefty allowance, and that the king had sent a female assassin after him once.”
“He mentioned that to me too, the assassin. I was his prisoner at the time and disinclined to ask for details. I believe I said something sarcastic in response.”
“Imagine my shock.”
“I’m not too old to throw a pillow at you.”
“Did I mention how feeble my back is?”
She rolled her eyes.
“All right, I’m running an image search based on my face, throwing a bunch of negatives in here to try to weed out results with my name or anything to do with Zamek University or robotics in it… Hm, perhaps I should feel flattered at how many entries there are that mention me.”
“Just don’t look up any vid stars or sports celebrities for a comparison. Your ego might wilt.”
“Yes, but have they been published in Modern Robotics Analysis Quarterly? Hm, here’s something. Let me share my display with you.” He pointed at his contact.
Kim nodded, and his search came up, along with the spot where he’d paused. An article shared the results of an air-bike race from twelve years earlier. The race had taken place six hundred miles down the coast from Zamek, near the city of Minato Doragon. Linked video clips showed hundreds of competitors zipping along cliffs and through a forested course, some being horribly maimed as they smashed into trees.
The winner that year had been a David Lichtenberg, who looked a lot like a younger version of Casmir. A little leaner in the face and more muscular in the fitted racing suit he wore in the picture, his helmet off and tucked under his arm, but not nearly as muscular as he was these days. He had graver eyes than Casmir, even though someone was in the middle of presenting a trophy to him, but there was a cocky twist to his lips. As if he’d expected nothing less than to win the race.
“That’s him,” Casmir, who had seen Rache with his mask off, said with certainty. “And Lichtenberg is not Jager’s surname. Not any of the royal surnames. It sounds familiar though. One of the noble families?”
The image shifted aside, as Casmir ran a search on Lichtenberg. The first hit—one
of many—that came up was of David Lichtenberg’s death in a horrific air-bike crash. It had happened the year after the race, which was one of several he’d won over a span of seven years. He’d disappeared from the racing circuit for nine months before that final race, then come back for one of the most dangerous courses in existence, where he’d crashed into another competitor, spinning his bike into a tree before he tumbled over a cliff and disappeared into the ocean hundreds of meters below. The body was never found.
“Sounds like he staged his own death for some reason,” Casmir said. “And here’s more on the Lichtenberg family. They are nobles, longtime friends of the Dietrichs, Jager’s line. The orphan, David Lichtenberg,” Casmir read, “was raised as a ward of the family, where he had the best tutors and was trained to be a knight from an early age. He passed the knight training and was officially made a knight at age twenty-one, less than a year before the race where he supposedly died.” Casmir’s face scrunched up. “I cannot imagine Rache as a chivalrous knight.”
“Maybe he was different then.”
“I imagine most people are different before their deaths.”
Casmir’s search, which he’d display-shared with Kim, blurred down her contact until he paused again, on an obituary with word about the funeral and how the king and queen had come down from the capital to attend.
“There’s nothing else?” Kim overrode his share to go back to the article of Rache—David—winning the race. “Something must have happened to prompt him to stage his death and go off to become a pirate.”
“Maybe he didn’t like his knight duties. Being chivalrous. Opening doors for women. Helping old ladies cross the street. Or maybe he didn’t like the dress code. That purple cloak. It must have chafed at his villainous black-embracing senses. Just a riot of odious colors. I bet he cringed every time he put it on.”
“Will you be serious?”
“Must I?”
“Unless you really do want me to throw something at you. You’re an easy target down there on the deck.”
“Damn, I shouldn’t have ceded the high ground to you. A true military leader wouldn’t have made that mistake.” Casmir snapped his fingers. “Oh, I forgot. There was talk of a dead fiancée.”
Kim stared at him. “He was engaged to be married, and the woman died? You didn’t think to mention that right at the start?”
“May I remind you that I was overhearing this conversation from fifty feet away while I was wedged into a crawlspace and trying to pull myself forward without being heard?”
“No.” Kim remembered the portrait of a beautiful young woman that she’d seen on the wall in Rache’s quarters. “Tell me about the fiancée.”
“They didn’t mention her name or anything about her. He was definitely still bitter about the loss though.”
Kim leaned back on her palms as she tried to imagine Rache being engaged to be married at twenty-one. That was so young, though she supposed not that atypical for the nobility. Those families still arranged marriages for their children, and many of them were finished with their private formal schooling by eighteen. Some went into the university systems to pursue advanced degrees, but a lot of them, especially the eldest, were simply apprenticed to their parents to learn to run the family estate and businesses. The younger children were often expected to train as knights or go into military service as officers.
But would any of that have applied to Rache? He had been a ward, not anybody’s heir. Kim wondered why he’d been raised as a ward of the Lichtenbergs instead of by Jager himself. If Jager had wanted to ensure he had excellent training and became a model military leader, wouldn’t he have wanted Rache at the castle where he could keep an eye on him from day to day?
No, Jager would have wanted his secret weapon kept a secret. If Rache had been raised at the castle as a ward of the king, everyone in the capital would have known about it. Someone might have figured out the secret early on—someone who’d seen authentic, unaltered pictures of Admiral Mikita. The Black Stars might not be the only ones who would have balked at the idea of Jager raising his own genius war leader to one day unleash on the Twelve Systems.
“Ah ha,” Casmir said, having flipped to other articles while Kim mused. “Here’s an announcement of the engagement. David Lichtenberg to marry Thea Sogard. It’s just a one-line mention in their local news.”
Kim looked up Thea Sogard, and a weird sensation crawled through her veins when her face came up. It was the same woman from the picture in Rache’s cabin, a woman he clearly hadn’t forgotten more than ten years later. She was—had been—from a rural noble family that ran vineyards and bred racehorses. Their estate was fifty miles farther down the coast from the Lichtenberg estate.
“I don’t see an obituary,” Casmir said, “but she went missing without warning, was searched for, and was never found.”
“When did she disappear?”
“Hold on. I was trying to find any earlier mentions of her in regard to Rache. He sure competed in quite a lot of races from ages fifteen to twenty-one. And won often. It’s hard to believe someone who shares my genes could be that good at racing air bikes. Between trees at a hundred miles an hour. Or maybe it’s faster.” He frowned at some article describing the races.
“Isn’t your eye the main reason you’re a klutz?”
“I’m not a klutz, schlemiel, or schlimazel if we’re importing Yiddish terms that I was called in my youth. I simply have bad depth perception, not bad balance. Though I’m not sure I can blame my eye for a general lack of athleticism. It’s mostly…” Casmir’s expression shifted from indignant to thoughtful. “Come to think of it, most of the sports I was horrible at as a kid did involve throwing, catching, and hitting balls. Though even sports without balls seem to involve accurately judging the terrain around you. Bike racing, skiing, surfing, driftboarding. Maybe if I’d found some sport that you did blindfolded, I could have excelled. Is there such a thing?”
“We sometimes blindfold students in the dojo so they can learn to rely more on their other senses and hear when a bokken is whistling toward them or the rustle of a uniform as their opponent attacks.” Kim hunted for other mentions of Thea.
“So I should have signed up for standing blindfolded in a room with people swinging sticks at my head? I’m not sure why my mother didn’t think to suggest that.” Casmir waved toward his contact. “You saw the time gap, right? When he was twenty-one, won that race, and then disappeared for months before entering another one. I don’t see any articles or mentions of him during that time period.”
“I did notice it. And I found the date Thea went missing. It was at the beginning of that time gap.”
“I see it too. Rache was racing regularly that year. Almost every month. And then the gap. And then he comes back only long enough to die.”
“I have his contact information,” Kim said. “I suppose I could send him a message and ask what happened, though I’m not sure he’d tell me.”
“You have his contact information?” Casmir stared at her.
“He gave it to me when you were setting up your kidnapped-by-Rache scheme.”
“Well, that should make it easy to ask him if he would work with us instead of against us.”
“Even if he agreed to that, which I doubt he would, do you truly believe Captain Ishii would go into battle with Rache’s ship at his side?”
“Maybe we could simply not tell him…”
“Five minutes until we enter the gate,” someone announced over the speaker.
Casmir pushed himself to his feet. “I better go strap myself to my bunk. I’ve heard gate travel is a weird experience. Which is probably a way of saying even more nausea-inducing than the rest of spaceflight.”
Kim waved a hand as he left, but her focus was on the network search as she read more about Rache’s race wins, more about Thea Sogard, and tried to find clues to hint at what had happened during that time gap in which Thea had officially been reported as missing.
Yas
reported to the bridge with his medical kit, having been summoned about an injury. It had been three days since they’d flown out of the gate and into System Hydra, and there hadn’t been so much as a hiccup to the gravity since then, so he didn’t know what kind of injury anyone could have suffered. Had he been summoned to the recreation room or gym, where the mercenaries regularly pummeled each other, he wouldn’t have been surprised. But the bridge, with Rache’s briefing room and quarters nearby, was rarely a source of drama.
When he stepped out of the lift and saw the striated blue-and-white ice moon filling the forward display, his breath caught, both because Xolas Moon was beautiful and because it was in his system. He’d flown by it at a distance before, but he’d never seen it from this close up. It was striking. And looked very cold and intimidating.
As a boy, he’d even read a series of fanciful novels written about children stranded on the moon and learning to survive. Never mind that the moon’s atmosphere wasn’t breathable, and that the temperatures of -150C were sure to freeze unprotected visitors instantly. The children, as he recalled, had shared their adventures with a talking sled dog, who’d been stranded with them.
If the Fedallah flew straight to Tiamat Station, depending on where in its orbit the moon’s gas giant was, they could reach it in two to three days. But the ship was orbiting Xolas, not flying past it on its way somewhere else. Looking for evidence of the astroshaman base, no doubt.
“Over here, Doctor,” came Rache’s cool voice from one of the monitoring stations.
He stood next to a seated lieutenant who was holding his nose, blood trickling through his fingers.
“What happened?” Yas dug into his kit for a roll of clotting bandage.
“I fell,” the lieutenant said, glancing at one of the two navigation officers.
The man’s back was to them, and he studied his console intently.
Crossfire (Star Kingdom Book 4) Page 17